[H]ere’s what was waiting in my inbox this morning:
I’m afraid you’ve been taken for a ride. See www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/urine_toxic.html
Here’s my reply:
Dan, it’s quite a coincidence that just yesterday I was writing about the unreliability of the urine test. I was making an effort to keep track of the questions friends and family are asking me…
It turns out that the chelation community doesn’t like the urine test either.
Their position is that the only reliable test is a chelation trial. To perform it, you’ll take DMSA every four hours for three days and two nights. If you don’t experience metal toxicity side effects, you’ve got nothing to worry about and you should discard the heavy metal toxicity theory.
A bottle of DMSA from vrp.com costs $30, about the same as the average co-pay to see a doctor.
On the other hand, if you experience fatigue, vivid dreams, headaches, physical pains, depression, or strong emotional upsets, you’ve confirmed that you are one of those individuals who is more sensitive to heavy metal accumulation and will benefit from getting the metal out.
I had a strong immediate reaction to the chelators and after five weeks of chelation have started to feel changes that have me feeling hopeful I may live normally again one day. Prior to chelation, I really had no hope and was resigned to a short lifespan full of struggle and suffering.
Still, it is too early for me to stand and shout about my cure. Way too early. But, I am in touch with other people doing chelation who have changed their lives so much that they are ecstatic. Ecstasy – the joy of shedding the ball and chain of serious chronic illness.
One in particular really inspired me. Suzy, who I talked with on the phone this week, lived for years and years like a freak, as I do, eating meat every hour to keep her hypoglycemia symptoms down. She told me about eating out of a trashcan once when she didn’t have food with her. I can identify, because when I run out of food it feels like I’m suffocating. Here’s what she said in her words:
My hypoglycemia was beyond TERRIBLE!! I had to eat every hour and keep meat in a cooler in my car, hot dogs in my purse, a pot of chicken on my night stand, and now after a year and a half of chelation, I can go 3 – 4 hrs without eating!!
What I see is that the chelation community wants to help people heal themselves by sharing information and there’s no money involved. Andy Cutler, whose protocol I’m following, is a PhD chemist from Princeton who fell ill and healed himself using the inexpensive chelators he recommends. ALA is available in every vitamin shop for about $8 dollars.
Yes, he wrote a book which he sells. But, he also put all the information online and it’s available to anyone who is interested for free.
I’m in touch with a lot of people who are experiencing remarkable recoveries and it’s thrilling. After searching for more than a decade, I’ve never found anything remotely like it.
So Quackwatch can write whatever it wants. Quackwatch lists Rolfing in its dictionary of quack stuff, yet I got a very immediate, tangible, and profound benefit from it that I did not get from any other sort of massage when I was suffering acutely from RSI.
I’m just saddened to think that some people who are suffering from heavy-metal sensitivity will be dissuaded from getting help they need because of Stephen Barret’s zealousness to attack everything he doesn’t understand.
When so much physical harm including death comes to patients at the hands of their MDs every year, I think it’s rather misguided for him to funnel so much energy into the quackwatch project instead of working to straighten out his own extremely broken profession.
I appreciate your comment/question and will document it in my FAQ too because it is always important to look at healthcare decisions from every angle with all the information you can gather, so thanks Dan!
Having searched for 12 years, I know how easy it is to fall prey to people selling dreams of healing. I believe I’ve come a long way and feel sure I’m not being taken for a ride this time.
In fact, I think almost every ride I’ve gone on has been with doctors with good intentions. The real quacks are pretty easy to spot because they are selling something quick and easy like magnets or surgery. That’s not what chelation is. It’s a long, slow, difficult process when done safely.
DDI fighting back -> http://www.bolenreport.com/feature_articles/Doctor%27s-Data-v-Barrett/discovery%20dam%20burst6.htm
Everything that we do can be measured in terms of “risk/benefit”. If someone is not overly toxic, a Challenge Test will be tolerated reasonably well and they will receive a list of metals and can then make some decisions on what they should do next.
If someone is quite toxic, this changes. I thought that I was having a stroke during the Challenge Test and even lost the ability to speak….that is, to make my mouth, tongue and larynx comply. It lasted for less that a minute but it was alarming. I felt totally “stoned”. In the end, mercury was measured at 35 which even quackwatch couldn’t ignore. Because of the chelator’s preferred affinity for mercury, the values for the other metals were inaccurate.
In my case, the risk exceeded the benefit. All I ended up with in the end was confirmation that I was Hg-tox which I pretty much already knew. I maintain that a hair test interpreted using Cutler’s counting rules will provide more information with a much more acceptable “risk/benefit” ratio. Like your site. brad
Thanks for stopping by Brad, I’m glad your challenge test worked out well as mine did. I think experiencing the chelator in your body can help instill the confidence and motivation you need to pursue a long-term treatment plan like frequent dose chelation.
“In the end, mercury was measured at 35 which even quackwatch couldn’t ignore.”
I think this is overly generous. The guy that runs quackwatch is a psychiatrist. These are the guys that think chronic fatigue should be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy! Quoting Rich van K:
“I guess this is being recorded so I have to be careful what I say. I’ll just tell you that over the past 15 years I’ve been on the patient Internet groups for chronic fatigue syndrome and I’ve heard from a lot of people some of whom have gone to Mayo and the report pretty much from every one, is that Mayo runs a whole lot of wonderful tests, they send you to various specialists and they all say “It’s normal and what you need to do is see our psychiatrist” and they send them over there and prescribe them an antidepressant. Okay — and that’s what Mayo does for chronic fatigue syndrome. And I think that’s still true.”
-eric
Well there you go, psychiatrists and their DSM are the real quacks, and thats being overly generous to say the least. I hope to live to see the day when they are all out of job, and when the contents of the DSM is empty and the listed diseases have real treatments. I luckily haven’t had the need to deal with one directly but people close to me have.